It Happened on the Way to War (29 page)

“Tuko pamoja,”
I said, using the phrase we often placed as the salutation to CFK letters and e-mails. “We are together.”

“
Pamoja
. And, Rye…”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

OUR VIETNAM-VETERAN GENERAL looked perfectly at ease. Everyone else in the cargo pit of the C-130 Hercules was pale, sick, and scared. A private sitting next to me uttered a prayer. My interpreter closed his eyes. Sausage and eggs sloshed between my stomach and my throat as our bird twisted, a seventy-five-thousand-pound roller coaster over the sands of Ethiopia. Weeks earlier, the U.S. Air Force pilot in the cockpit had reported that he may have been shot at by a surface-to-air missile in the vicinity of Gode, a small town en route to Somalia.

The Ethiopian Army used Gode, a predominately Somali town by ethnicity, as a key logistical hub. It had the only paved airfield in the region that could support jumbo-jet landings. From Gode, the Ethiopian government had waged counterinsurgency campaigns since 1977, when Somalia invaded Ethiopia and attempted to annex the Somali-speaking Ogaden region. During the mid-1980s, Gode caught a glimpse of international spotlight when relief workers had arrived to fight one of the world's worst famines in recorded history. The commonly cited, though unverified, statistic was that one million Ethiopians died as a result of two years of famine. It was an unimaginable number, a figure so staggering that I found it incomprehensible until I arrived and discovered that Gode was one of the most desolate wastelands I had ever seen.

“What did these people do to piss God off?” our sergeant major said as we stepped off the cargo plane's drop ramp and surveyed the scorched earth.

We had traveled with an entourage to visit the renovation of a local school. A U.S. Army civil affairs team met us at the airfield. They were accompanied by their security detachment, a squad of infantry soldiers from Guam, the U.S. island protectorate in the Pacific Ocean. The American ambassador to Ethiopia arrived with an economic-development specialist from USAID and some other members of her staff. We were the embodiment of unconventional warfare. Our Horn of Africa Task Force convened multiple sources of American power and influence to win “hearts and minds” in a troubled region that we believed was highly susceptible to transnational terrorism. It was an impressive group, and it was what I thought America needed to be doing around the world. Shoot less, give more.

Eventually we reached a hamlet of mud-and-wattle huts and pulled up to a freshly painted concrete building surrounded by a chain-link fence. This was our school, and there wasn't much to see. Our entourage outnumbered the handful of Ethiopian civilians who had turned up for the occasion. The school's rooms were empty. The tour from the local Ethiopian contractor lasted less than ten minutes. No one knew how many kids would attend the school, or when it would open for classes.

My interpreter and I spoke to a few Somali men with high foreheads and distinctly angular faces. The men said our school renovation was good and that they were happy. Another man asked me when we would build him a home. As we began to head back to the convoy, three Ethiopian soldiers pulled a middle-aged Somali man off to the side for no apparent reason. The other Americans were focused on getting into the convoy and handing candy out to a gaggle of children screaming, “GIMME, GIMME!” and “USA NUMBA ONE!”

One of the Ethiopian soldiers drilled the butt of his rifle into the Somali man's stomach, causing his body to buckle and fold onto the dusty ground. I followed them as they dragged the man by his wrists behind the school.

“What are you doing?” They froze as soon as they saw me.

The highest-ranking soldier shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What did he do wrong?”

“This man, no good,” the soldier replied, walking away and leaving the Somali man in the dust with a bloody nose and fiery eyes.

My interpreter looked at the man and whispered to me, “This is why they hate the army here.”

OUR CONVOY DROVE ten minutes to one of the few permanent structures in Gode. While the ambassador and the general went into a cement-block building for official meetings, my interpreter and I took a stroll up a dirt road in search of someone to talk with. We stopped at a mud hut with a sign that read RESTAURANT in Somali. Four men inside were watching Al Jazeera coverage of the Iraq War. They turned around and looked startled. My eyes darted to their waistlines in search of concealed weapons. The men wore colorful
kikoy
wraps that many American soldiers referred to as “man dresses.”

“Ma nabad baa.”
I announced the common Somali greeting with a big smile.

My greeting broke some of the tension. The men laughed and replied in high-pitched Somali,
“Nabad, nabad”
(Peace, peace).

“I prefer CNN.” I gestured to the TV, spotting two AK-47s on the tables behind them.

“We don't. But me, sometimes I like Christiane Amanpour,” one of the men said, referring to the famous CNN war correspondent. He asked me what I thought of the Iraq War.

“It's bad.” My pistol pressed against my stomach. My interpreter didn't carry a weapon. I was outgunned.

“Yes. Bad.” The man nodded.

“How 'bout you?” I asked.

“I think it's wrong.”

“Well, I agree.”

The man raised his eyebrows. He wasn't expecting that response. However, I didn't want a discussion about Iraq. That could go on for hours and wouldn't reveal anything of intelligence value. I changed the topic and asked the man if he knew why we were in Gode.

“You think we're Al Qaeda. But bin Laden is not here.” He laughed, and the others joined. “In fact we have no problems with you.”

“You have problems with the Ethiopian Army?”

The man tapped the wood table with one finger but didn't respond.

“Have they gotten better since we arrived?”

Suddenly the man became angry. “They're the same as they were during the Dergue. They're fucking dogs. You understand? You understand what they do to us, to our women? Nothing has changed. Only now they wait until you turn your back.”

“The Dergue?” I asked. My interpreter hesitated. I had no idea that the Dergue was the Communist military council that ruled Ethiopia from 1975 to 1987, killing and torturing thousands of citizens during a seventeen-year civil war. The U.S. government had once channeled covert resources into the hands of resistance fighters, including Ethiopians of Somali ethnicity. My interpreter's body language was screaming at me not to ask such an ignorant question. I rephrased it: “Yes, the Dergue was bad.”

Al Jazeera replayed footage of Iraqi children allegedly killed by an American bomb. The video was graphic, filled with body parts and wailing women.

“You know, we have no problem with the United States,” the man finally said. “Our problem is this government. They build military bases, never schools. You come and renovate a school and that we can appreciate. But they're using you to keep us down. They call us terrorists. Terrorists? No, we're not. We're fighting for our rights, you see. Look how we live. We live like animals. You have dogs that live better than we do.”

Frank conversations rarely happened in such circumstances. Unfortunately, my radio flashed with a signal. The general and ambassador were ready to leave. I asked the man if he would be willing to have another conversation.

“I cannot,” he replied. “I've already told you too much. Just go.”

We loaded into our heavily armed convoy to return to Djibouti after less than five hours in Ethiopia. It was still early in our nine-month deployment, and I had arrived in Gode believing that we were pioneers of a new, more effective way of counterterrorism. I left with doubts, and my doubts would only grow deeper with time. Most of the military men and women in the task force were as ignorant of Ethiopia's geopolitics as I was. Our tours lasted six to twelve months, and each of the five countries where we operated had long, complex histories. With the exception of HUMINT and civil affairs, most of the fifteen hundred members of the task force, including its many senior officers, such as my colonel, never interacted with locals.

In 2001, intelligence analysts had suggested that bin Laden and Al Qaeda might attempt to flee from Afghanistan. East Africa was a logical migration point because bin Laden lived in Sudan from 1992 to 1996. In 1998, Al Qaeda had orchestrated the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. For whatever reasons, the projected terrorist migration never happened. Three years later, we were still in Djibouti and showing no signs of leaving or scaling back.

Our situation reminded me of Kibera. The slum was rife with external actors such as the United Nations and NGOs. Too often these organizations pushed projects without local leadership and knowledge of what was really happening. Now the tables were turned. I was part of one of the largest external actors in the region—the U.S. military—and it was unclear how our team would effect positive change in any of the countries where we operated.

We didn't have a clue, and it came back to Colonel Greenwood's critique. Long-term U.S. military engagements were often fatally flawed because they lacked continuity and regional expertise. Were we deterring transnational terrorism in Gode? It was tough to tell, in part because the task force never collected data on its impact. Maybe we were building goodwill in Gode; maybe we were resented because of our affiliation with the Ethiopian Army; maybe we were legitimizing a repressive regime. No one knew, and too often by the time our leadership asked the essential strategic questions, they were preparing for the next mission. “Crown rotations” was what one of my buddies called the constant change of command, and with every new commander came new priorities, personalities, and power dynamics. The only thing we were certain of in the Horn of Africa was that none of us would be there for more than a year.

MIDWAY THROUGH MY deployment I called Captain Dubrule on satellite phone. He was at a base in Ramadi, the capital of the largest Sunni province in Iraq. Our Marines were about to surge to Fallujah and begin the bloody takeover of that embattled city. Shortly after he picked up the phone a deafening explosion occurred.

“Mortar,” Captain Dubrule calmly observed. I learned later that the mortar had landed directly on a portable toilet, killing a Marine captain.

“You still want to deploy to Iraq?” he asked. He knew my four-year service obligation was coming to a close. His time as our commander would also end before our company would deploy for a third tour to Iraq the following year.

I didn't need to think about my response. “Absolutely.”

“And after Iraq?” Captain Dubrule had a hundred other things on his mind as he prepared to lead our company through some of the fiercest fighting of the war, yet he wanted to make sure I was thinking about my career.

“I don't know, sir. Maybe graduate school.” While a strong part of me loved being a Marine and didn't want to give it up, I questioned if I could continue my balancing act with CFK and Tracy. The course I was on wasn't sustainable.

“Time goes fast, Rye. I'd encourage you to think about it now and plan ahead. You know we'd love to keep you in the Corps. But you need to do what's right for you.”

Our conversation reminded me of my plans over the past year. After returning from Bosnia, I had stitched together something that had resembled a career path, or, at least, a next step. The closer I aged to thirty, the less likely it seemed that I would realize my premonition of an early death. A career in foreign policy, perhaps one day becoming an ambassador or working at the National Security Council, sounded exciting and meaningful. To have such a career, I needed a graduate degree, and law school or a Ph.D. in international affairs seemed to be obvious options.

At the time, Tracy was grinding through a six-year Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. During some months she was so broke she sold her plasma to pay her bills. While I wasn't motivated by a goal of making a lot of money, I didn't want a lack of resources to hold me back from living a life with options. A law degree was quicker, more versatile, and potentially more lucrative than the Ph.D. Once I realized the trade-offs, I had registered for the LSAT and decided to apply for law school, assuming that if I was accepted, I could defer admission until I completed a tour to Iraq.

Tracy supported my law school plan, though I didn't mention the Iraq part. She applied for a psychology fellowship at Yale in anticipation of my admission at Yale Law School, my top choice. Unfortunately, I had scored around the fiftieth percentile on the LSAT. With such a score I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting into Yale. I saw the data, but I had applied anyway. Months later, Yale and every other school sent me regrets.

Wounded by the rejections, I was searching for other options when my friend Andrew Carroll told me about an impressive manuscript he was reviewing for a Marine captain named Nathaniel Fick. The manuscript later became the bestseller
One Bullet Away
, and Nathaniel took time to answer my uninformed questions about his dual business and public-policy masters' degree program at Harvard. I had thought about Harvard's Kennedy School of Government ever since my meeting with Dr. Frazer at the White House. The business half of the degree sounded equally interesting. I believed many nonprofits, including CFK, could be improved by the best practices in business management, and my experience in Kibera seemed to fit with an emerging field called social entrepreneurship.

Once Tracy accepted her fellowship to Yale, she encouraged me to apply to the Harvard dual-degree program, which would keep us within driving distance of one another. My closest mentors thought that the combination of public policy and business made sense. Although I wasn't confident that I could get into Harvard, which was a source of considerable stress, there was a larger issue. I wasn't ready to leave active duty without leading Marines in combat.